Controllable Image Colorization with Instance-aware Texts and Masks

Recently, the application of deep learning in image colorization has received widespread attention. The maturation of diffusion models has further advanced the development of image colorization models. However, current mainstream image colorization models still face issues such as color bleeding and color binding errors, and cannot colorize images at the instance level. In this paper, we propose a diffusion-based colorization method MT-Color to achieve precise instance-aware colorization with use-provided guidance. To tackle color bleeding issue, we design a pixel-level mask attention mechanism that integrates latent features and conditional gray image features through cross-attention. We use segmentation masks to construct cross-attention masks, preventing pixel information from exchanging between different instances. We also introduce an instance mask and text guidance module that extracts instance masks and text representations of each instance, which are then fused with latent features through self-attention, utilizing instance masks to form self-attention masks to prevent instance texts from guiding the colorization of other areas, thus mitigating color binding errors. Furthermore, we apply a multi-instance sampling strategy, which involves sampling each instance region separately and then fusing the results. Additionally, we have created a specialized dataset for instance-level colorization tasks, GPT-color, by leveraging large visual language models on existing image datasets. Qualitative and quantitative experiments show that our model and dataset outperform previous methods and datasets.

@article{an2025_2505.08705,
  title={ Controllable Image Colorization with Instance-aware Texts and Masks },
  author={ Yanru An and Ling Gui and Qiang Hu and Chunlei Cai and Tianxiao Ye and Xiaoyun Zhang and Yanfeng Wang },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.08705},
  year={ 2025 }
}